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Comment by ikken | Hacker News Reader

Using VPN will not change Russian laws, but GitHub not complying with the request might help Russian tech sector realize how dangerous and ridiculous the law is and trigger more pressure on government to change it.

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Conversely, GitHub complying may also help Russia come to its senses.

  GitHub: "Hey everyone, we've got something awesome."
  Russia: "We don't want it."
  Everyone else: "We'll take it."
  Russia: "Hey, how come everyone's doing better than us."
  Everyone else: "We used the free thing; it's awesome."
  Russia: "дерьмо"

"Дерьмо" is not the right word for the context. It's used to refer to a poor quality of something or someone, but not to express a feeling of disappointment.

You want "ой", "блин", "бляха-муха" or "блять".

You want "oh", "pancake", "plaque-fly" or "fuck".

Always interesting to see how cursing translates to other languages. Or other phrases for good/bad. 牛逼 is literally "cow cunt," but people use it to mean "great." That was very strange to me until I realized that "bad ass motherfucker" literally meant "an incestuous incompetent donkey."

Is learning how to swear properly in various languages a valid hobby? It seems like a fun one.

Actually "блин" is more of a ... "crêpe" than "pancake" :)

Simon Quinlank would approve.

Thanks; as you can probably guess, I'd just Google Translated; but good to learn some new vocab; think I'll join @sillysaurus3 in his new hobby.

«Вот дерьмо» sounds right.

Won't work: the free thing is a howto for suicide, so "Everyone else" is now dead!

Isn't that the basic error of this whole ordeal? Thinking that there are tons of people who want to commit suicide, but they don't do it because they don't know how to, and finding a text document on Gitub that describes how to would remove that obstacle.

https://github.com/l29ah/objidlib/blob/master/suicide.txt

So what are they going to do, stop google from indexing suicide instructions? That's ridiculous.

Russian authorities could easily upload anything to github to justify censorship. Since they can freely choose, the debated content can't be part of the justification. (even if I acknowledge that there is some emotional value which has to be considered in public policy..)

I hadn't realised what the content was, my argument's more one of general censorship. Given the content It's hard to take seriously (not meaning to be disrespectful to anyone affected by suicide)...

  - What sort of person looks up how to commit suicide on the internet?

I'd guess anyone wanting to commit suicide would know how; the only reason to research would be presumably be morbid facination rather than actual intent.

  - Will blocking content alter the outcome of someone's decision.

Assuming it's purely instructional I doubt it. If it includes content aimed at lowering or raising the person's self esteem then perhaps it may (negatively or positively) have some influence..

  - Will blocking content benefit anyone in some other way?

Perhaps; if the article proposed jumping in front of a train over taking an overdose it will lead to a train driver having to live with someone else's bad decision on their conscience, and to a number of passengers experiencing disruption (which may lead to further impacts down the line).

However, I'd say GitHub are still right to allow countries' authorities to block content...

  - If the content is beneficial to the country and they block it, they lose out.
  - If the content is detrimental to the country and they block it, they do well.

In both cases the country lives with the consequences of its decisions. The only place where that argument breaks down is where the countries and their citizens interests aren't aligned. For example, an article on how to overthrow your government. In such cases citizens would look for ways to avoid being discovered reading such content anyway (e.g. using Tor to avoid monitoring, which would also get them around any such blocking) - but I admit that's bypassing the debated point.

Here the debated point becomes should a government say what content its people should be able to see, should a platform owner have the responsibility for content on their platform, should it be down to the content's creators, or to those choosing to access the content. To that, I suspect there isn't a good answer; or at least, I don't know.

Not sure if you're joking, but the free thing is github.

No, the "free thing" is the repo that Russia had blocked, which is a howto guide for suicide.

Syntax error on line 4: Russian government acknowledging others' superiority.

So... in what way would them not complying cause your scenario above to change? Github has something awesome, everyone else gets it, Russia doesn't because they're blocking github. In fact, it's more likely to happen if they don't comply. The amount of things Russia is blocking currently is a small subset of everything on github. Odds are they're allowing access to something awesome.

Especially if there are a lot of Russian tech companies relying upon Github then that could be a useful strategy. Or it might only result in a separate Russia-only version of Github.

Of course, having lots of tech companies rely on Github cuts both ways. Yes, it might apply pressure to the Russian government but it also cuts directly into Github's finances if a significant portion of their revenue stream suddenly dries up.

Besides, given how well the recent economic sanctions worked, which were created to target those closest to Putin in order to apply pressure where it matters most, I doubt a few tech companies are going to be able to change much. I admit I could be wrong here, however.

I, too, wish that Github wouldn't have caved, but I can easily understand hot it might not have been feasible for them.

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